Part biography, part meditation on the calling and task of mentoring, Bezzant's new volume on Edwards is as unique as it is insightful. While not attempting a complete biography, Bezzant nonetheless gives a fresh look into Edwards's life through his social relationships. The angle Bezzant takes is through his mentoring. Edwards entered into mentoring relationships both explicitly, in the young men looking to be shepherded under his care for the sake of their own ministry, and implicitly, through his letter writing. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of Edwards at his most vulnerable, providing a picture of Edwards not usually seen. But this historical analysis was not written for its own sake, as interesting as the narrative is in its own right. Bezzant recognizes in Edwards's life a challenging confrontation of forces that mirror our own, and attending to Edwards's response is as much of a practical interest as it is an historical one. It is a fact of history that Edwards's followers—those young men he mentored—went on to create the first major theological movement and “school of thought” in North America. Practically, little has been done to attend to Edwards's role in this movement beyond simply bequeathing them his theological insights. Bezzant's volume fills that void.

After George Marsden's biography, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press, 2004), Edwards studies has exploded with works on theology and philosophy that seem to have displaced the preference for engaging Edwards's life more directly. There are counterexamples, but most of them continue to advance questions surrounding the revivals and the rise of evangelicalism. Two volumes helped create the new space that Bezzant's volume treads. The first, and probably closer to Bezzant's emphases, is Douglas Sweeney's volume, Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word: A Model of Faith and Thought (InterVarsity Press Academic, 2009), which focuses on Edwards's ministry as an angle into his life and thought. Like Bezzant, Sweeney offers Edwards as a model (with qualifications) to consider for contemporary ministry. The second would be Carol Ball's Approaching Jonathan Edwards: The Evolution of a Persona (Ashgate, 2015), which attends to Edwards as a public figure through meditating on how he constructed his public persona. Closer to Sweeney's approach than Ball's, Bezzant advances his own previous work on Edwards's ecclesiology, providing a particularly deep well for reflecting on Edwards's social relationships.

Bezzant begins by locating Edwards within the history of mentoring, providing the following definition:

After this initial mooring, Bezzant considers Edwards's mentoring in light of the “affective turn” and the distinctively modern difficulties besetting those in ministry. Of particular interest in this section is what Bezzant reveals about Edwards's vulnerability and reciprocity in mentoring relationships. Rather than the hierarchical relation normally assumed between Edwards and his followers, what arises are relationships that go beyond the uni-directionality of many mentoring relations to true friendship. Edwards's mentees were more like an inner circle of friends who were relied upon for support, encouragement, and discernment. Building on this later in the book, Bezzant argues that this is a central facet of Edwards's legacy, creating a context for the training of ministers in the New World according to the “New Divinity.” While Edwards's legacy is well known and highly regarded, it has not always been appreciated that he was more than a lone genius whose theology profoundly influenced the colonies and nascent evangelicalism. Bezzant's work shows that Edwards's impact was driven by a training network governed, ultimately, by a kind of intimate mentoring given direction by Edwards himself and carried on by his mentees.

In the third chapter, Bezzant takes a turn away from narrating Edwards's practice to a more theoretical register. Here we discover how Edwards's theology, in particular his understanding of anthropology, the visual reality of knowing Christ, and the beatific vision, ordered his understanding of what mentoring relationships entail. Bezzant navigates well the temptation to focus solely on either Edwards's practices or simply to exposit theoretical material, showing that either path would be a reductive approach to the topic. Having focused on the practical, he then turns to the theoretical, locating Edwards's practice in his rich theology of personhood, participation, and vision under the framework of “the Mimetic Way.” The focus on personhood, participation, and vision to reconstruct Edwards's notion of mimesis is a brilliant synthesizing move, being both original, as far as I can tell in Edwards studies, while also grasping several of the most fundamental strands of Edwards's theology. What this helps unveil is a Reformed instinct of recent interest; the formation of a person is a decisively relational endeavor, and in Edwards one sees the real practical import of this theology on friendship, mentoring, and, through those endeavors, the development of institutions.

Bezzant concludes with a reflection on how Edwards's mentees advanced the cause of the New Divinity, briefly tracing the life of Edwards's son, Jonathan Jr., showing how Edwards's mentees mentored him. This chapter shows the fruit and trajectory of Edwards's mentoring as it spread throughout New England and helped establish the DNA of what is known now as American evangelicalism. It is this movement that would help construct and advance new training models and institutions in the early years of evangelicalism. It would be impossible to fully articulate the impact of this movement on the American consciousness, institutions, and social thought, but there is no doubt that it was substantive. Bezzant's volume gives a glimpse into the inner-workings and logic of this movement—not of its ideals but of the relational features that held it together. This volume is profoundly interesting, original, and, perhaps, prophetic in timing, as American evangelicalism is confronted with questions about the training of pastors in an age of revolution.